MARINE wildlife rescuers have discovered why they lost a gruelling battle to save a whale’s life – the tragic ocean giant had swallowed 85 plastic bags. Vets and volunteers fought to keep the stricken creature alive for five-days, cradling it in their arms and keeping the blazing sun off with red umbrellas.

Moments before the eight foot long pilot whale began gasping its final breaths, the dedicated rescue team were given a clue to the creature’s plight as pieces of plastic started to be vomited into the water.

An autopsy conducted in Thailand over the weekend discovered so many large plastic sacks crammed into the whale’s stomach that officials were unable to move around in the operating theatre without standing on the rubbish.

In all, more than 17lb of plastic was pulled from inside the whale, indicating how feeding would have become impossible as it languished in a canal on the Thai-Malaysian border.

Thailand’s Marine and Coastal Resources Department has released graphic images from the post mortem to highlight the need to reduce plastic pollution, especially in the countdown to World Oceans Day on June 8.

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“This plastic rubbish made the whale sick and unable to hunt for food,” said department chief Jatuporn Buruspat.

“We will use the whale case and invite all sectors to show their intentions on how to reduce the use of plastic in Thailand.”

The oceans’ toxic plastic soup is becoming an increasing threat to marine life.

An estimated one million birds and 100,000 sea mammals and turtles perish every year after becoming trapped or mistakenly eating plastics as food.

Every square kilometre of the world’s oceans is believed to contain 13,000 pieces of plastic, and for creatures that eat jellyfish and squid, a synthetic bag can be easily mistaken as a prey item.

The vet who carried out the post mortem on the emaciated pilot whale said it was the worst case of plastic ingestion she had witnessed.

“We found a lot of plastic bags in the stomach, I think around 85 plastic bags,” explained Dr Watchara Sakornwimon.

“Because he's a whale he can travel around the world. So he ate plastic bags wherever he was that day before he became stranded.

The tragic ocean giant had swallowed 85 plastic bags (Image: DMCR)

In all, more than 17lb of plastic was pulled from inside the whale (Image: DMCR)

“Animals need nutrients, the brain orders them to eat, but because this is a sick whale, when the whale's sick, he cannot hunt. So after that, when they find something easy to eat, they just eat, but it's not food, it’s plastic. It cannot digest the plastic.”

The dead whale is likely to have been the short-finned species of pilot whale, which have been nicked named the “cheetahs of the sea” because of their high-speed pursuits of squid.

Pilot whales, sperm whale and orca appear to be prone to swallowing plastic because of their hunting techniques.

A 30ft sperm whale, weighing almost seven tons, was found dead on a Spanish beach earlier this year with more than 60lb of rubbish trapped in its guts.

Two years ago, a number of the 30 sperm whales stranded in the North Sea were also found to have swallowed plastic debris such as netting.